Speech #820209662

The Senator from New York is absolutely correct. and I thank him for his contribution. The next paragraph of my address is more or less confined to the very subject discussed by the Senator from New York. In an attempt to justify the elimination of professors from nonquota status. it has been contended that such persons henceforth would qualify as first preference quota immigrants. This assumption is essentially untrue. Professors would so qualify under the proposed bill only if they *could prove to the satisfaction of the Attorney General that their services were needed urgently in the United States. Most professors. like other immigrants. come to this country not because an official of the Government has decided that they would be useful. but because conditions in their native lands have become intolerable or distasteful. Such ordinary professors. under S. 2550. would have to wait their turn as ordinary quota immigrants. The fact that admission of educators under a preference would. in any event. postpone the entry of other worthy immigrants is. presumably. beneath notice. These three sections which I have mentioned are but a few of the provisions of S. 2550 which would prevent the admission of immigrants who would be particularly valuable additions to our population. The harmful effects such restrictions would have upon American unity. upon the national economy. and upon the role of the United States as the moral leader of the world can readily be predicted. If nothing else. enlightened selfinterest demands that the proposed provisions be wholly rejected. I could go on and on taking apart many other sections in the bill which I believe would have an overall harmful effect. But to me the distribution of quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924. as continued in effect by the pending bill. is a shocking display of a discredited theory of racial superiority. I respectfully submit that if we are to tinker at all with our present immigration laws. then one of our primary objectives should be to erase that obvious blot upon our national shield as quickly as possible. Yet. despite the gross injustices of its provisions. S. 2550 would make no material change in the operation of the 1924 statute. Ostensibly. the 1924 Quota Act had as its sole purpose the reduction of immigration to a point consonant with the ability of the United States to absorb this new population. If such control over admissions were the only real goal. however. it seems logical to me that a study of either recent or all immigration statistics would have been made and an acrosstheboard cut upon the figures so determined would have been the technique upon which immigration quotas were fixed. Such a formula. or any modified version thereof. would have reflected the then current pattern of entry for each nationality group. and would have given appropriate weight to the influx of settlers from areas which had not made substantial contributions 1P52 early in our history. but whose contributions were constantly on the increase. This procedure. of course. would have resulted in relatively large quotas for the peoples from southern Europe and consequently was completely intolerable to the racially biased framers of the 1924 act. Instead of an equitable quota system. based upon actual prior immigration figures. therefore. the draftsmen instituted a formula based upon the composition of the American population at the arbitrary cutoff date of 1920. which. in effect. placed severe restrictions upon immigration from southern. central. and eastern Europe in favor of the countries in the northern and western portions of that Continent. As a few comparative figures will illustrate. this formula took into account not only how many individuals from a particular nationality group had ever entered the United States. but also how long those individuals or their descendants had been in this country. thus objectively discriminating against those who were newcomers. In the period from 1789 to 1924. for example. Great Britain sent to this country no more than 7.000.000 immigrants. For this contribution. that nation was accorded 65.721 quota numbers. of which. incidentally. it uses merely a fraction. In the same period. Italy sent to this country approximately 4.400.000 immigrants. yet. for this great contribution that nation was accorded only 5.802 quota numbers. for which. I might add. there has always been a heavy demand. At this point let me say parenthetically that I hope the sponsors of the McCarran bill will ascertain how the descendants of those immigrants compare with the number who were in the American Army in the last World War. and how many of those boys were the sons of Italian immigrants. M.. DOUGLAS.